There Were More White Slaves
Than Black Slaves in Colonial America
A famous history professor stated that history was not a science but a continuing investigation into the past; a person's conclusion is based on their own bias. This story will offer evidence that the Alba, Scots, Irish and Pics have been the longest race held in slavery. The reader will be responsible for their own bias pertaining to White Slavery.
Alexander Stewart was herded off the Gildart in July of 1747, bound with chains. Stewart was pushed onto the auction block in Wecomica, St Mary's County, Maryland. Doctor Stewart and his brother William were attending the auction, aware of Alexander being on that slave ship coming from Liverpool England. Doctor Stewart and William were residents of Annapolis and brothers to David of Ballachalun in Montieth, Scotland. The two brothers paid nine pound six shillings sterling to Mr. Benedict Callvert of Annapolis for the purchase of Alexander. He was a slave.
Alexander tells of the other 88 Scots sold into slavery that day in "The Lyon in Mourning" pages 242‑243. Jeremiah Howell was a lifetime‑indentured servant by his uncle in Lewis County, Virginia in the early 1700's. His son, Jeremiah, won his freedom by fighting in the Revolution. There were hundreds of thousands of Scots sold into slavery during Colonial America. White slavery to the American Colonies occurred as early as 1630 in Scotland. According to the Egerton manuscript, British Museum, the enactment of 1652: it may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant.. in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.
The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662‑1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class. (Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, vol. 1, p 181, vol. 2, p 101).
The above accounting sounds horrific but slavery was what the Scots have survived for a thousand years. The early ancestors of the Scots, Alba and Pics were enslaved as early as the first century BC. Varro, a Roman philosopher stated in his agricultural manuscripts that white slaves were only things with a voice or instrumenti vocali. Julius Caesar enslaves as many as one million whites from Gaul. (William D Phillips, Jr. Slavery From Roman Times to Early Transatlantic Trade, p. 18).
The documentary record compels us to face the fact that a holocaust was perpetrated against generations of poor White People whose sufferings are far more than is presented here. The horrors they experienced equal anything the more famous sufferers have undergone. Yet, of all the dusty shelves in the dark corners of "Suppressed" history, none has been more completely obscured than the story of the White Slaves of Colonial America!
A famous history professor stated that history was not a science but a continuing investigation into the past; a person's conclusion is based on their own bias. This story will offer evidence that the Alba, Scots, Irish and Pics have been the longest race held in slavery. The reader will be responsible for their own bias pertaining to White Slavery.
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Alexander Stewart was herded off the Gildart in July of 1747, bound with chains. Stewart was pushed onto the auction block in Wecomica, St Mary's County, Maryland. Doctor Stewart and his brother William were attending the auction, aware of Alexander being on that slave ship coming from Liverpool England. Doctor Stewart and William were residents of Annapolis and brothers to David of Ballachalun in Montieth, Scotland.
The two brothers paid nine pound six shillings sterling to Mr. Benedict Callvert of Annapolis for the purchase of Alexander. He was a slave. Alexander tells of the other 88 Scots sold into slavery that day in "The Lyon in Mourning" pages 242‑243. Jeremiah Howell was a lifetime‑indentured servant by his uncle in Lewis County, Virginia in the early 1700's. His son, Jeremiah, won his freedom by fighting in the Revolution.
There were hundreds of thousands of Scots sold into slavery during Colonial America. White slavery to the American Colonies occurred as early as 1630 in Scotland. According to the Egerton manuscript, British Museum, the enactment of 1652: it may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant.. in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.
The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662‑1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class. [1]
The above accounting sounds horrific but slavery was what the Scots have survived for a thousand years. The early ancestors of the Scots, Alba and Pics were enslaved as early as the first century BC. Varro, a Roman philosopher stated in his agricultural manuscripts that white slaves were only things with a voice or instrumenti vocali. Julius Caesar enslaves as many as one million whites from Gaul. [2]
Pope Gregory in the sixth century first witnessed blonde hair, blue eyed boys awaiting sale in a Roman slave market. The Romans enslaved thousands of white inhabitants of Great Britain, who were also known as Angles. Pope Gregory was very interested in the looks of these boys therefore asking their origin. He was told they were Angles from Briton. Gregory stated, "Non Angli, sed Angeli." (Not Angles but Angels).
The eighth to the eleventh centuries proved to be very profitable for Rouen France. Rouen was the transfer point of Irish and Flemish slaves to the Arabian nations. The early centuries AD the Scottish were known as Irish. William Phillips on page 63 states that the major component of slave trade in the eleventh century were the Vikings. They spirited many 'Irish' to Spain, Scandinavia and Russia. Legends have it; some 'Irish' may have been taken as far as Constantinople.
Ruth Mazo Karras wrote in her book, "Slavery and Society in Medeivel Scandinavia" pg. 49; Norwegian Vikings made slave raids not only against the Irish and Scots (who were often called Irish in Norse sources) but also against Norse settlers in Ireland or Scottish Isles or even in Norway itself slave trading was a major commercial activity of the Viking Age. The children of the White slaves in Iceland were routinely murdered en masse. [3]
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There were many times more Whites brought to America as Slaves than there ever were Blacks. And the White Slaves were treated much worse! |
According to these resources as well as many more, the Scots‑Irish have been enslaved longer than any other race in the world's history. Most governments do not teach White Slavery in their World History classes. Children of modern times are only taught about the African slave trade. The Scots do not need to be taught because they are very aware of the atrocities upon an enslaved race. Most importantly, we have survived to become one to the largest races on Earth!!!
The record of suppressed records, portions excised in the interests of dogma, politics and all the other alibis of falsehood. We will present to you the truth and follow it wherever it leads, however much it upsets the peddler's cart of the modern pitchmen of recent opinion. Elbert Hubbard tells us that, "It is not deeds or acts that last, it is the written record of those deeds and acts."
Mr. Hoffman herein provides a small voice as a memorial to the heroic lives of toil and the indomitable spirit of perseverance of the White Slaves of the past, who are in many cases the Forefathers and Foremothers of Millions of Americans Alive Today; a Vital Part of Our Heritage Which Should Never Be Forgotten!
This is a history of White People that has seldom, if ever, been told in any coherent form, largely because most modern historians have, for reasons of politics or psychology, refused to recognize White Slaves in early America as just that.
Most Historians of Today Are Total Cowards, and Are Not Willing to Present Anything That Might Upset the Establishment. And if they do display the courage necessary to present the truth, they will be ridiculed and driven from the faculties of the so‑called halls of learning.
Others have their own agenda, which has nothing to do with truth; an agenda to present a false historical perspective so as to destroy the faith of White Americans and so destroy their pride in the process. "They were of two sorts, first such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants. Such as we call them my dear,' says she, 'but they are more properly called slaves.'" [4]
Today, not a tear is shed for the sufferings of millions of our own enslaved forefathers. Two hundred years of White Slaver in America has been almost completely obliterated from the collective memory of the American people. "Who wants to be reminded that half ‑‑ perhaps as many as two‑thirds ‑‑ of the original American colonists came here, not of their own free will, but kidnaped, shanghaied, impressed, duped, beguiled, and yes, in chains?...we tend to gloss over it...we'd prefer to forget the whole sorry chapter..." [5]
A correct understanding of the authentic history of the enslavement of Whites in America could have profound consequences for the future of the races: "We cannot be sure that the position of the earliest Africans differed markedly from that of the White Indentured Servants. The debate has considerable significance for the interpretation of race relations in American history." [6]
Most of the books researched are titled with words like "White Indentured Servitude," White "bondservants," White "servants" etc. It is interesting that White People who were bound to a condition of what became in many cases permanent chattel slavery unto death, are not referred to as slaves by Establishment academics. With the massive concentration of educational and media resources on the Negro experience of slavery the unspoken assumption has been that only Blacks have been enslaved to any degree or magnitude worthy of study or memorial. The historical record reveals that this is not the case, however.
White People
Have Been Sold as Slaves for Centuries!
For instance, among the ancient Greeks, despite their tradition of democracy, the enslavement of fellow Whites, even fellow Greeks, was the order of the day. Aristotle considered White slaves as things. The Romans also had no compunctions against enslaving Whites who they too termed "a thing."
In his agricultural writings, the first century B.C. Roman philosopher Varro labeled White Slaves as nothing more than "tools that happened to have voices."
Cato the Elder, discoursing on plantation management, proposed that White Slaves when old or ill should be discarded along with worn‑out farm implements. Julius Caesar enslaved as many as one million Whites from Gaul, some of whom were sold to the slave dealers who followed his victorious legions [7]
In A.D. 319 the "Christian" Emperor of Rome, Constantine, ruled that if an owner whipped his White Slave to death, "he should not stand in any criminal accusation if the slave dies; and all statutes of limitations and legal interpretations are hereby set aside." [8]
The Romans enslaved thousands of the early White inhabitants of Great Britain who were known as "Angles," from which we drive the term "Anglo‑Saxon" as a description of the English race.
In the sixth century Pope Gregory the First saw blond‑haired, blue‑eyed English boys awaiting sale in a slave market in Rome. Inquiring of their origin, the Pope was told they were Angles. Gregory replied, "Non Angli, sed Angeli" (Not Angles, but Angels). When the Franks [French] conquered the Visigoths in Southern Gual huge numbers of Whites entered the slave markets.
"After Charlemange's conquest of Saxony, during which many Saxons were enslaved, he set up a network of parish churches. To provide for the maintenance of the priest and the church, those living in the parish were to donate a house and land as well as a male and female (Saxon) slave to the church for every 120 people in the parish." [9]
The trade in White Slaves was one of the few sources of foreign exchange for Western European powers in a period when the East produced the goods that Europeans could not procure elsewhere. The Sale of White Slaves to Asia and Africa was one of the few sources of gold for European treasuries.
From the eighth to the eleventh century France was a major transfer point for White Slaves to the Muslim world, with Rouen being the center for the selling of Irish and Flemish Slaves. "At the same time that France was a transfer point for slaves to the Muslim world, Italy was occupying much the same position....Venetians (were)...selling slaves and timber across the Mediterranean. The slaves were usually Slavs brought across the Alps...The Venetians were the earliest successful Italian sea traders and because profits on (slave) trade with the Muslims were lucrative, they resisted efforts to stop them. In return for their exports of timber, iron and (White) Slaves, they brought in oriental luxury products, mainly fine cloths..." [10]
The stereotype from Establishment consensus history is of the Muslim slaver herding chained Blacks through the desert. In fact, for seven hundred years, until the fall of Muslim Spain, Those Being Herded Were First and Foremost Overwhelmingly White: "Before the tenth century the Muslims generally bought Christian Europeans as slaves...By the tenth century, Slavs became the most numerous imported group... during the late Middle Ages, until the fall of Grenada in the late fifteenth century, most slaves of the...Muslims were Christians from the northern kingdoms..." [11]
"In the vast lands of the Eastern European steppes from the eighth to the twelfth century, there was a well‑developed slaving network ...Slavs and Finns, called sqaliba (slaves) indiscriminately by the Muslims, entered the Muslim world by these Caspian and Black Sea routes." [12]
The fate of the hundreds of thousands of White Slaves sold to the Arabs was described in one Spanish text as "atrocissima et ferocissima" (most atrocious and harsh). The men were worked to death as galley slaves. The women, girls and boys were used as prostitutes. White Males had their genitals mutilated in castration attempts which were bloody procedures of incredible brutality which most of the White men who were forced to submit did not survive, judging from the high prices White eunuchs commanded throughout the Middle Eastern slave markets. Escape from North Africa and the Middle East was almost impossible and those White Slaves who were caught trying to flee were punished by having their noses and ears cut off, or worse.
Early Muslim texts provide insights into the extent to which the Arabs identified Europeans with slavery, classified White Slaves as animals and even produced learned racist disquisitions on the supposed merits of emasculated East European slaves.
In his ninth century treatise on beasts, The Book of Animals, the Muslim scholar Jahiz writes: "Another change which overcomes the eunuch: of two slaves of Slavic race, who are...twins, one castrated and the other not, the eunuch becomes more disposed toward service, wiser, more able, and apt for various problems of manual labor... All these qualities you find only in the castrated one. On the other hand, his brother continues to have the same native torpor, the same lack of natural talent, the same imbecility common to slaves, and incapacity for learning a foreign language." [13]
Whites were also enslaved in Russia and I do not refer here to serfdom which was a later development: "Knowledge of the existence of slavery in early modern Russia is not widespread. Many people know of the existence of serfdom, and confuse the two." [14]
The White Russian Muscovites were enslaved both by Northern European raiders as well as massive slave‑catching operations launched by the Mongols and the Ottoman Empire [Now you know why the White Russians hate the Jews, who are Mongolian descendants, so very much]. Russians also enslaved each other to such an extent that in 1571 an official Slave Chancellery was established which formally codified White Slavery as a Russian institution. [15]
In the ninth century the Vikings sold tens of thousands of Whites to the Arabs of Spain. According to Michael Wood's book In Search of the Dark Ages: "An Arab traveler of the time who came to Spain remarked on the great numbers of European slaves in harems and in the militia. The palace of the Emir of Cordoba in particular had many White Girls...Of these unfortunate people the Vikings were undoubtedly a major source of supply...The Arabs in Spain saw the long‑term potential of this trade, and as early as the 840s sent a diplomatic mission to Scandinavia to put it on an organized basis."
"The most westerly component of the early medieval slave trade in Europe was the British Isles. In the eleventh century the Vikings were active slave traders in Ireland...From Ireland the Vikings took the slaves to be sold in Muslim. Spain and Scandinavia, and even to be transported into Russia; some may have been taken as far as Constantinople and the Muslim Middle East..." [16]
"The Norwegian slave trader was an important enough figure to appear in the 12th century tale of Tristan...Icelandic literature also provides numerous references to raiding in Ireland as a source for slaves...Norwegian Vikings made slave raids not only against the Irish and Scots (who are often called Irish in Norse sources) but also against Norse settlers in Ireland or the Scottish Isles or even in Norway itself...Slave trading was a major commercial activity of the Viking Age...[17] The children of White Slaves in Iceland were routinely murdered en masse." [18]
David Brion Davis writing in the New York Review of Books, Oct. 11, 1990, p. 37 states: "As late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, continuing shipments of White Slaves, some of them Christians, flowed from the booming slave markets on the northern Black Sea coast into Italy, Spain, Egypt and the Mediterranean Islands... From Barbados to Virginia, colonists...showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from that of chattel slaves... The prevalence and suffering of White Slaves, serfs and indenture servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin."
L. Ruchames in The sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America, states: "...the slave trade worked in both directions, with White Merchandise as well as black." [19]
In 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the New World. In the Debate the Whites Were Referred to, Not as "Indentured Servants," but as "Slaves" whose "Enslavement" threatened the liberties of all Englishmen. [20]
Foster R. Dulles in Labor in America quotes an early document describing White Children in colonial servitude as, "...Crying and Mourning for Redemption from Their Slavery."
Dr. Holary McD. Beckles of the University of Hull, England, writes regarding White Slave labor, "...indenture contracts were alienable...the ownership of which could easily be transferred, like that of any other commodity...as with slaves, ownership changed without their participation in the dialogue concerning transfer." Dr. Beckles refers to "indentured servitude" as "White Pro‑Slavery" [21]
In the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series; America and West Indies of 1701, No. 919, p. 565, we read of a protest over the, "...encouragement to the spiriting away of Englishmen without their consent and Selling Them for Slaves, which hath been a practice very frequently and known by the name of kidnaping."
In the British West Indies, plantation slavery was instituted as early as 1627. In Barbados by the 1640s there were an estimated 25,000 slaves, of whom 21,700 Were White. [22] It is worth noting that while White Slaves Were Worked to Death in Barbados, there were Caribbean Indians brought from Guiana to help propagate native foodstuffs who were well‑treated and received as free persons by the wealthy planters. "...White Indentured Servants Were Employed and Treated, Incidentally, Exactly like Slaves..." [23]
In the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, whose records date to 1633, we find a 1638 description of a White Man, one Gyles Player, as having been "Delivered up for a Slave." The Englishman William Eddis, after observing White Slaves in America in 1770 wrote, "Generally speaking, They [White Slaves] Groan Beneath a Worse than Egyptian Bondage." [24]
Governor Sharpe of the Maryland colony compared the property interest of the planters in their White Slaves, with the estate of an English farmer consisting of a "Multitude of Cattle."
The Quock Walker case in Massachusetts in 1783 which ruled that slavery was contrary to the state Constitution, was applied equally in Blacks and Whites in Massachusetts. Patrick F. Moran in his Historical Sketch of the Persecutions Suffered by the Catholics of Ireland, refers to the transportation of the Irish to the colonies as the "slave‑trade." [25] The disciplinary and revenue laws of early Virginia (circa 1631‑1645) did not discriminate Negroes in bondage from Whites in bondage. [26]
Lay historian Col. A.B. Ellis, writing in the British newspaper Argosy (May 6, 1893): "Few, but readers of old colonial State papers and records, are aware that between the years 1649‑1690 a lively trade was carried on between England and the plantations, as the colonies were then called, in political prisoners...where they were sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes for life as slaves."
Sir George Sandys's 1618 plan for Virginia referred to bound Whites assigned to the treasurer's office to "belong to said office for ever." The service of Whites bound to Berkeley's Hundred was deemed "perpetual." [27] Certainly the enslaved Whites themselves recognized their condition with painful clarity. As one White man, named Abram, who was accused of trying to agitate a rebellion stated to his fellows, "Wherefore should wee stay haere and be slaves?"
In a statement smuggled out of the New World and published in London, Whites in bondage did not call themselves "indentured servants." In their writing they referred to themselves as "England's slaves" and England's "merchandise." [28]
Eyewitnesses like Pere Labat who visited the West Indian slave plantations of the 17th century which were built and manned by White slaves labeled them "White slaves" and nothing less. [29] The Blacks themselves referred to the White forced laborers in the colonies as "white slaves." [30]
Sot‑Weed Factor, or, a Voyage to Maryland, a pamphlet circulated in 1708, articulates the plight of tens of thousands of pathetic young White Girls kidnaped from England and enslaved in colonial America, lamenting that: "In better Times e'er to this Land I was unhappily Trepan'd...Not then a slave...But things are changed...Kidnap'd and Fool'd..."
The height of academic and media fraud in the monopolistic trademark status the official controllers of education and mass communications have successfully established between the definition of the world "slave" and the Negro, while labeling descriptions of the historic experience of Whites in slavery a fallacy. Yet the very word "slave" which the establishment's consensus school of history pretends cannot legitimately be applied to Whites, comes from the word Slav. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word slave is another name for the White people of eastern Europe, the Slavs. [31]
In other words, the word slave itself has always been a term for and a definition of White slaves, not Blacks. Yet we are told by modern historians that it is not proper to refer to Whites as slaves but only as servants, even though the very root of the word is derived from the historical fact of White slavery. The Oxford English dictionary traces the word slave (also sclaue, sclave, sclayff) to the medieval Latin sclavus which was the name for the Slavs. The German philologies Grimm trace this word for the Slavic peoples and chattel enslavement to late Greek, medieval Latin and German sources in their Deutsches Worterbuch under the heading "Sklave."
In early Britain another White nationality bore the same eponymous stigma. The West Saxon word for slave was Eielisc (from the Old English Wealth), which was also the name for the Celtic or Welsh race but by the ninth century had the distinct meaning in Britain of "slave." Other words for White Slaves which demonstrate the ubiquity of White enslavement include: esne and peow (Old English). Thrall is an anglicized work taken from Scandinavian sources (In Middle English thrawl and in Old English prael from the Old Norse praell).
Drigil (Old High German probably derived from the Proto Old Norse prahilar and the Proto‑Germanic preghila, from the Gothic pragjan). Amboot (Old Swedish); ambactus (Celt); annopoghaer (Old Danish); anauoigr (Old Icelandic); mansalsmaor (Old Norse; literally "man‑sale‑man").
Lasyr (esyr) and rab are the Russian words for slave. The English word robot is derived from the Russian word for work, rabota, "the labor of a slave" [32] which says much about the legacy of White slavery in Russia.
The Muslims called White Slaves by the Arabic version of the word Slav, saqaliba. The definitions of "felon" and "convict" in this period were entirely constructed by the ruling class. For example, in 1699 the Shoplifting Act extended capital offenses to include any theft from a shop to the value of five shillings. Hence a "convict" was very often a starving boy who had committed the "felony" of stealing food for his brothers and sisters. It does not seem like much of a mercy to take him from his parents and siblings forever to slavery in a foreign land.
Even hardened professional criminals feared transportation more than hanging because, unlike some 20th century establishment historians, they were not blind to first‑hand accounts from sailors and others that penal enslavement in the colonies was often more horrible than death itself, was in fact a kind of living death: "I...told him...if he was Transported, there might be a Hundred ways for him that was a Gentleman, and a bold enterprising Man to find his way back again, and perhaps some Ways and Means to come back before he went. He smiled at that Part, and said he should like the last the best of the two, for he had a kind of Horror upon his Mind at being sent over to the Plantations as romans sent condemn'd Slaves to Work in the Mines; that he thought the Passage into another State, let it be what it would, much more tolerable at the Gallows, and that this was the general Notion of all the Gentlemen who were driven by the Exigence of their Fortunes to take the Road." [33]
White slaves were obtained from the poorest levels of British society. These White human beings existed in conditions of great hardship. The ruling class regarded them as completely expendable. The English slums of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were pits of White suffering. London's St. Giles was known locally as "Rat's Castle."
A policeman who worked the area used metaphors from the insect world to describe the conditions of the Whites there, referring to them as "vermin haunted heaps of rags." Opening the door to a tiny shack the policeman discovered: “Ten, twenty, thirty, who can count them? Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese factory...a spectral rising, unshrouded, from a grave of rags." [34]
Herman Melville, in his autobiographical account of his first voyage as a sailor, described the same living death in the English port city of Liverpool in 1839: "...I generally passed through a narrow street called 'Launcelott's ‑ Hey...once passing through this place...I heard a feeble wail...it seemed the low, hopeless, endless wail of someone forever lost. At last I advanced to an opening...to deep tiers of cellars beneath a crumbling old warehouse; and there, some fifteen feet below the walk, crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed over, was the figure of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two shrunken things like children that leaned toward her, one on each side. At first, I knew not whether they were alive or dead...They were dumb and next to dead with want. How they had crawled into that den, I could not tell; but there they had crawled to die...I tried to lift the woman's head; but feeble as she was, she seemed bent upon holding it down. Observing her arms clasped upon her bosom, and that something seemed hidden under the rags there, a thought crossed my mind which impelled me forcibly to withdraw her hands for a moment when I caught glimpse of a meager little babe, the lower part of its body thrust into an old bonnet. Its face was dazzling white, even in its squalor; but the closed eyes looked like balls of indigo. It must have been dead some hours...I stood looking down on them, while my whole soul swelled within me; and I asked myself, what right had any body in the wide world to smile and be glad when sights like this were to be seen?" [35]
Charles Darwin's Uncle , factory owner Josiah Wedgewood, Owned a Business That Worked White Children of Five Years of Age in a Chemical Factory Permeated with Lead Oxide, a Deadly Poison. Wedgewood acknowledged that the lead made the children "very subject to disease" but worked them anyway.
The English writer Frances Trollope estimated that at least 200,000 English children were "snatched away" to factories, "...taken and lodged amid stench, and stunning, terrifying tumult; driven to and fro until their little limbs bend under them...the repose of a moment to be purchased only by yielding their tender bodies to the fist, the heel or the strap of the overlooker (overseer)." [36]
In 1723 the Waltham Act was passed which classified more than 200 minor offenses such as stealing a rabbit from an aristocrat or breaking up his fishpond, a crime punishable by hanging. Starving fourteen year olds were strung‑up on Tyburn gallows for stealing as little as one sheep. When their bodies were cut down their parents had to fight over them with agents of the Royal College of Physicians who had been empowered by the courts to use their remains for laboratory dissection. Appeals were made directly to the throne. But, those who had lent to the king were more influential than the petitions of his imperiled people. For each slave sold into Virginia the King received part, and consequently his creditors received part. "The borrower is slave,” What good was a ruler who was servant to another and that other was a stranger who detested The Law.
Thomas Jefferson wrote: "George the Third has waged cruel war against humanity itself, violating its most scared rights of life and liberty, in the persons of a distant people who never offended him; captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative (veto) for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit, or restrain, this execrable commerce...he is now exciting these very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." [37]
The English historian William Cobbet stated in 1836, "The starving agricultural laborer of Southern England are worse off than American Negroes."
When in 1834 English farm workers in Dorset tried to form a union in order to "preserve ourselves, our wives and our children from starvation" they were shipped into slavery in Australia for this "crime." The situation of White factory workers was no better. Robert Owen declared in 1840, "The working classes of Great Britain are in a worse condition than any slaves in any country, in any period of the world's history."
In 19th century England tens of thousands of White Children were employed as slave laborers in British coal mines. Little White Boys, seven years old, were harnessed like donkeys to coal carts and ordered to drag them through mine shafts.
In 1843, White Children aged four were working in the coal pits. In old English cemeteries can be seen epitaphs on grave stones like one which reads, "William Smith, aged eight years, Miner, died Jan. 3, 1841."
English children forced to work as chimney sweeps died miserable deaths stuck inside chimneys and suffocated. Young boys were preferred for their facility for entering narrow smoke channels. William Blake was driven nearly mad with grief at the condition of these little boy sweeps, asking in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, "Are such things done on Albion's shore?”
In 1830, the Rev. Richard Oastler, a Methodist minister in York, protested the conditions in the Bradford woolen mills where little children labored thirteen hours a day and were beaten if they fell asleep. Oastler attacked the hypocrisy of Yorkshire clergymen and politicians who condemned with great fervor the enslavement of Blacks in the West Indies while in England, "thousands of our fellow creatures...are this very moment...in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system 'colonial slavery.'"
Oastler was publicly thanked by a delegation of English laborers at a meeting in York, "...for his manly letters to expose the conduct of those pretended philanthropists and canting hypocrites who travel to the West Indies in search of slavery, forgetting there is a more abominable and degrading system of slavery at home." [38] ; "In Bleak House Dickens was to satirize evangelical 'telescopic philanthropy' in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, a do‑gooder so absorbed in the welfare of the African natives of Borrioboola‑Gha that she fails to notice her own family sinking into ruin. This was precisely Carlyle's point: with Irish...dying in ditches...it was the worst sort of rose‑pink sentimentalism to worry oneself about West Indian Negroes..." [39]
An unknown poet expressed the bitter irony:
"That night a chariot passed her,
While on the ground she lay;
The daughters of her master
An evening visit to pay‑
Their tender hearts were sighing
As wrongs to Negroes were told;
While the white slave was dying
Who gained their father's gold." [40]
In the late 1830s William Dodd began his exhaustive research into the condition of the English poor. He estimated that in the year 1846 alone. 10,000 English workers, many of them children, had been mangled and mutilated by machinery or otherwise disabled for life. They were abandoned and received no compensation of any kind. Many died of their injuries. "Petition after petition has been sent to the two houses of Parliament, to the prime minister, and to the Queen, concerning this unfortunate class of British subjects, but without effect. Had they only been black instead of white, their case would have been taken into consideration long ago." [41]
The Rev. Charles Edwards Lester, the great‑grandson of the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, and later the American Consul in Italy, states that if he had a choice between having his children born negro slaves in the South or poor people in England, he would choose the former: "I would sooner see the children of my love born to the heritage of Southern slavery than to see them subjected to the blighting bondage of the poor English operative's life." [42]
"John Randolph of Roanoke, traveling in England and Ireland with his black manservant Johnny, wrote to a friend back home: 'Much as I was prepared to see misery in the south of Ireland, I was utterly shocked at the condition of the poor peasantry between Limerick and Dublin. Why sir, John never fled so proud of being a Virginia slave. He looked with horror upon the mud hovels and miserable food of the White Slaves, and I had no fear of his running away." [43]
The poverty and exploitation of Whites in Britain was so enormous in its cruelty that it probably cannot even be grasped by a modern American.
Historian Oscar Hardlin writes that in America, White, "servants could be bartered for a profit, sold to the highest bidder for the unpaid debts of their masters, and otherwise transferred like movable goods or chattels.. In every civic, social and legal attribute, these victims of the turbulent displacements of the 16th and 17th centuries were set apart. Despised by every other order, without apparent means of rising to a more favored place, these men and their children, and their children's children seemed mired in a hard, degraded life...The condition of the first Negroes in the continental English colonies must be viewed within the perspective of these conceptions and realities of (White) servitude ..." [44]
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White Slaves Were Actually Owned by Negroes and Indians in the South to Such an Extent That the Virginia Assembly Passed the Following Law in 1677: |
The history of enslavement in America as portrayed in the tunnel vision of the corporate media has focused exclusively on the enslavement of negroes. The impression is given that only Whites bear responsibility for enslaving negroes and only negroes were slaves. In fact negroes in Africa as well as American Indian tribes such as the Cherokee engaged in extensive enslavement of negroes. The Cherokee Indians owned large plantations on which they worked their negro slaves in gangs. [45]
"It is enacted that no negro or Indian though baptized and enjoined their own freedom shall be capable of any such purchase of Christians..." [46]
Negroes Also Owned Other Negroes in America. [47]
While Whites Languished in Chains Blacks Were Free Men in Virginia Throughout the 17th Century. [48] In 1717, it was proposed that a qualification for election to the South Carolina Assembly was to be, "the ownership of one white man." [49]
Negroes voted in the Carolina counties of Berkely and Craven in 1706, "and their votes were taken." [50]
Blacks were toting guns or other weapons and going about armed in the service of wealthy landowners at the same time that tens of thousands of enslaved White men were forbidden arms. In 1678 one thousand Negroes were armed by the planters and formed into a fighting militia for protection against the French. [51]
Even some of the early colonial Blacks had White Slaves!
Insurrections in North America
Philadelphia : In 1741, Blacks burned a church along with a number of other buildings and robbed a private dwelling. An investigation uncovered a conspiracy to burn the town, massacre the Whites, and establish a country of their own. Thirty were hanged for participation in the plot and others sold elsewhere.
Haiti : The insurrection in Haiti was a momentous thing. It determined the basic White attitude toward Blacks in Virginia and other states where the refugees from San Domingo landed. Their pitiful stories were such that could not be easily forgotten. It was felt that if such a thing could happen there it could happen here. That event shocked the Whites as nothing else had ever done. The outlook of America was colored by that bloody event.
Gabriel's Revolt : In 1800, an insurrection took place in Virginia led by a slave named Gabriel. As in the cases of the Indian attacks, there was no advance warning, no suspicion that such an event was in the offing. Gabriel set out toward Richmond with a large group of Blacks armed with scythes and other farm implements. Some had firearms stolen and given to them by their masters. A violent storm caused creeks to rise which stopped the advance. A chance rider stumbled onto the army, and escaped with his life. He and his horse swam the swollen streams and rode to Richmond with the alarm. Local militias quickly formed and went to the scene. The Blacks scattered into the woods and were gradually rounded up. The ringleaders were executed and the rest returned to their plantations.
Nat Turner's Revolt : Nat Turner was different from Gabriel. Turner was weak and feeble while Gabriel was large and strong. Turner was cunning, however. He, too, conceived the plan to exterminate Whites. His motives remain unknown. At his trial, he stated that he had always been treated kindly. Lacking physical prowess, he became a witch doctor, a thing forbidden on the plantations, but which existed without White knowledge. He had a sheet of paper on which a sun and a crucifix had been drawn in blood. There was much more to it than this, but only blacks know. When this paper was shown to other Blacks accompanied by certain words it produced a hypnotic obedience and thrill of excitement. Nat Turner also is said to have traveled throughout the whole of South side Virginia with his bloody signs and magic words. He was welcomed everywhere.
On August 21, 1831, he and his followers took axes and killed his master, his wife and children as they slept. They plundered the farm and then went on to another farm where the servants there helped his group kill a lady and her ten children. Their itinerary and timing were exact, they knew just where to go and when to arrive. Next, on to a school attended by a large number of White children. These were quickly dispatched, mostly by swinging their heads against the building to bash their brains out. Then another lady and her children were shot down as they tried to escape.
The alarm went out and local militias tracked down the insurgents, killed some, and captured 21. Nat Turner was found hiding in a woodpile. This gave birth to the well‑known saying, "There's a nigger in the woodpile." Fifty‑five whites had been killed, mostly women and children. Of the 21 insurgents captured, only thirteen were hanged including Nat Turner. He went to his death never explaining the reason for his actions. The present day establishment media presents Nat Turner as a hero, instead of the cold blooded murderer he actually was.
In Carolina in 1704, 1707, 1712, 1738 and 1741 bills were passed authorizing armed negro militias in the service of the planters. In 1742 certificates were presented tot he Black militiamen for services rendered.[52]
During the American Revolution, Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia appointed by the King, sought to win Virginia back for the British Crown with Black troops recruited in America, to be called the Ethiopian Regiment. Parties of Blacks in the South were armed by the British with guns, clubs and swords with the order to use them against rebellious Whites.[53]
Except for a few extremely brief asides under the euphemism "indentured servitude," no school textbooks or mass media presentations have studied in any depth the history of the massive enslavement of White People in North America.
Even if they attained their freedom, dirt‑poor Whites were forced to compete against negro slave labor. Jobs were few and Southern Planters Sat Idly as Poor Whites Died of Malnutrition for Want of Food and Medicine. Negro slaves were expensive. To protect their investments. White aristocrats usually treated their Negro slaves well, providing for adequate food, clothing and medication Even as Poor Whites in the Same Town Sickened and Died from Disease and Malnutrition.
Try to envision the 19th century scene: yeoman southern Whites, sick and destitute, watching their children dying while enduring the spectacle of negroes from the jungles of Africa healthy and well‑fed thanks to the ministrations of their fabulously wealthy White owners who cared little or nothing for the local "White Trash."
In the course of an 1855 journey up the Alabama River on the steamboat Fashion, Frederic Law Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, saw bales of cotton being thrown down from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the Men in the Hold Were Irish. Olmstead inquired about this to a mate on the ship.
"Oh, said the mate, 'the niggers were worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddles are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.'" [54]
"When I was a boy, 'recalled Waters McIntosh, who had been a slave in Sumter, South Carolina, 'we used to sing, 'Rather be a nigger than a poor White Man,' Even in slavery we used to sing that.' Mr. McIntosh's remarks reveal...that the poor whites of the South ranked below blacks in social standing...slaves felt unbridled contempt for lower‑class whites...Frederick Douglas opened his famous Life and Times with an account of Talbot County, Maryland, which he said housed a 'White population of the lowest order...
Throughout the South the slaves of many of the larger planters lived in a society of blacks and well‑to‑do Whites and were encouraged to view even respectable laboring Whites with disdain...Ella Kelly, who had been a slave in South Carolina...You know, boss, dese days dere is three kind of people. Lowest down Is a Layer of White Folks, then in de middle is a layer of colored folks, and on top is de cream, a layer of good White folks...
The slaves noticed their masters sense of superiority toward marginal farmers as well as toward poor Whites and, by associating themselves with 'de quality White folks,' strengthened their self‑esteem...a...slave expressed no surprise that his master, who was Big Buckra, never associated with White trash. And Rosa Starke, who had been owned by a big planter in South Carolina, reported that poor Whites had to use the kitchen door when they went up to the Big House. Her mistress 'had a grand manner; no patience with Poor White Folks.'...
The many (Negro) ex‑slaves who recalled the lot of the small farmers and Poor Whites as Hard and Even as Bad as Their Own knew what they were talking about...The slaves saw enough abject poverty, disease, and demoralization among the Poor Whites...to see their own condition under Old Massa's protection as perhaps not the worst of evils." [55]
This situation engendered a rage in the descendants and survivors of White Slavery which has seldom been accounted for in the history of White working class support for the Northern abolitionist cause. We can gauge the attitude of yeoman Whites. Especially in the border states like Kentucky and Tennessee, but throughout the United States as well, who were either neutral during the Confederacy's struggle or sided with Lincoln, from the statement of an Iowa Congressman who maintained that it was the planter aristocracy "which exalts and spreads Africans at the expense of the White Race." [56]
Some of the leaders of the Free Soil Party and many of the Unionist soldiers who made up the ranks of Lincoln's armies in Southern Ohio, Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Southern Illinois, Kentucky and elsewhere were survivors of White slaver or descendants of White Slaves. They do not view themselves as advocates of what was then referred to as racial "amalgamation."
One remarkable former member of the "poor White Trash" of the South who exhibited a lifelong solidarity with his own kind, was the phenomenally successful Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, U.S. Senator, Vice‑President and 17th President of the United States. A prevailing myth has it that Lincoln [57] was assassinated because hidden powers knew he would be lenient to the South during Reconstruction. This view is exploded when one studies the background and views of his successor to the presidency, who was everything to the defeated Southern people (though not to their Planter‑dominated Confederate leadership, who he generally despised), that the myth‑makers claim Lincoln would have been.
President Johnson was impeached mainly through the partisan efforts of politicians such as Rep. Thaddeus Stevens and Sen. Charles Sumner, precisely because Johnson refused to cooperate in the collective Reconstruction punishment of poor White people in the South. Andrew Johnson was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, where at the age of ten he was apprenticed to the Selby tailor shop and ordered to work twelve hours a day, until he was 21 years of age.
"Andrew could hardly miss feeling the striking contrast between himself and the (White) elite ...the aristocrats' contempt was scarcely hidden. When Andrew and his cousins once ran across the path between the house of John Devereaux and that of his son, Devereaux sent his coachman to whip the boys back to their shanty...The Whip Was Habitually Used on Those the Devereaux Called 'Poor White Trash.'" [58]
After enduring nearly six years of apprenticeship, Johnson fled Raleigh. A ten dollar reward was posted for his capture. By law, no other employer in North Carolina was allowed to give him work. As long as he remained in North Carolina was allowed to give him work. As long as he remained in North Carolina he was in danger of capture. Johnson fled to Tennessee where he went into business for himself and eventually became a leader of men. Johnson has been described as having, "...strongly held predilections for the (White) laboring classes and...deepest prejudice against the blacks." [59]
As military governor of Tennessee during the war Johnson protected the White Poor [60] Johnson was a staunch Unionist, strictly devoted to preserving the county as one nation. Lincoln selected him as his vice‑president in 1864 because Johnson was a border‑state Southerner, a constituency which was Lincoln's crucial power base and one he sought to fortify with Johnson, never expecting the latter would ever be anything more than a figurehead. That Lincoln and Johnson held very different views on racial matters was evident when Lincoln introduced Johnson to a Black leader at the inauguration: "Frederic Douglas recalled that when Lincoln pointed him out to Johnson prior to the ceremonies, the vice president responded at first with a bitter expression of contempt...Douglas concluded right then and there that the Tennessean was no friend of the black race." [61]
As president, Johnson ordered the removal of Negro troops from East Tennessee and Mississippi. He also, "... reanimated (White) Southern resistance and fatally undermined the efforts to integrate the (Negro) freedmen into society...According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Johnson wrote to Governor Thomas C. Fletcher of Missouri, 'This is a country for White Men and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for White Men."
In 1859, while U.S. Senator, Johnson, "...asserted that the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that all men were created equal could not apply to Negroes...the 17th president unquestionably undermined the Reconstruction process...What defeated him during his term in the White House was not so much his lack of formal education, nor even his tactlessness, but his failure to outgrow his Jefferson‑Jacksonian background. Johnson's continued identification with an America of small farmers and 'mechanics,' his attachment to a strict construction of the Constitution that was no longer in vogue, his refusal to adjust to the racial views to the needs of the Republican party, and his persistent belief in the agrarian myth, blinded him to the realities of the post‑Civil War U.S....Considering the effect of his policies upon the South, he had achieved at least in the long run what he wanted, the continued existence of viable Southern state governments within the Union and the maintenance of White Supremacy." [62]
Historically they regarded themselves as separatists and viewed the Southern planter's desire to spread Negroes into California, Oregon and other territories as a grave threat to free White labor and the Biblical principle of racial separation. [63]
Congressman David Wilmot sponsored a law to ban Black slavery in the American West. He dubbed his proposed law, "the White Man's Proviso." He was bitterly opposed by the Southern elite. Wilmot told Congress that he intended to preserve America's western frontier for "the sons of toil, my own race and color." [64]
During much of the Civil War the politician and military leaders of the Confederacy could not travel in certain parts of the Deep South without armed escorts, [65] for fear of attack from "Upcountry" Southern Whites who hated the planter aristocracy and the war they saw as being for the sole benefit of the expansion of the planter's "infernal Negroes."
Upcountry Southern Whites consisted in large part of the survivors and the children of the survivors of White Slavery who resided in the hills, mountains and Piedmont regions of the South under frontier conditions. An aristocrat described them in the 18th century: "Humanity can scarce forbear to drop a tear on reflecting on the circumstances of many of them. With a poor wretched hut crowded with children, naked, hungry and miserable without bread or a penny of money to buy any, in short they appear as objects almost too contemptible to excite the public resentment..." [66]
In the antebellum 19th century South, "A large number of White Southerners lived in the upcountry, an area of small farms and herdsmen...engaged largely in mixed and subsistence agriculture...Little currency circulated, barter was common and upcountry families dressed in 'home‑ spun cloth, the product of the spinning wheel and the hand‑loom.'
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White Slaves Drained the Swamps, Cleared the Forests, Built the Roads. They Worked and Died in Greater Numbers than Anyone Else. |
This economic order gave rise to a distinctive sub‑culture that celebrated mutuality, egalitarianism (for Whites) and ...independence...mountain counties rejected secession from the outset. One citizen of Winston County in the Northern Alabama hill country believed yeoman had no business fighting for a planter‑ dominated aristocracy: 'All tha want is to git you...to fight for their infernal Negroes and after you do their fightin' you may kiss their hind parts for o tha care." [67]
Poor Whites had to be drafted into the Confederate army. As in the North, where resistance to conscription was widespread many Southern Whites saw the conflict as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight."
Indeed, any slaveholder owning 20 or more Black slaves was exempt from military combat. From 1609 until the early 1800s, between one‑half and two thirds of all the White colonists who came to the New World came as slaves. Of the passengers on the Mayflower, twelve were White Slaves.[68] Both psychologically and materially Whites in modern times are called upon to bear burdens of guilt and monetary reparation for Negro slavery. This Position Is Based Entirely on Enforced Ignorance and the Deliberate Suppression of the Record of White Slavery in North America.
Millions of Whites had been enslaved during the antebellum era in America while millions of others were too poor to afford even a mule, much less a Black slave. Slave reparations and guilty feelings are due, if one subscribes to such a thing as retroactive collective guilt, from the descendants of the minority of wealthy Whites who owned Negro slaves and who, in the South at least, were themselves generally reduced to penury in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Reparations would also have to be paid by the descendants of the Cherokee and other American Indian tribes who owned Black slaves; by the heirs of Black tribal leaders in Africa who sold them into slavery by the Dutch Jews who owned the slave ships that transported Negroes to the colonies.
Negro involvement in the enslavement of their fellow Blacks was extensive: "...in Africa...down to the 1930s, the various tribes continued to raid one another to capture slaves both for domestic use and to sell to outsiders. Moreover, in spite of the picture presented in Alex Haley's Roots, White Slave traders almost never entered the interior in pursuit of prey but rather purchased their cargo from Africans at the ocean front; coastal Africans would not allow Europeans either into or through their own countries...Before the appearance of the (Suzanne) Miers and (Igor) Kopytoff and Meillassoux volumes, [69] some scholars claimed that slavery in Africa was a response to the international slave trade, but it is now obvious that (Black) slavery was an old domestic institution that was adapted for supplying the international market when it developed." [70]
For information on Jewish involvement in the enslavement of Negroes; See History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles, Vol. 1, Isaac and Suzanne A. Emmanuel, pp. 74‑78. Reparations must also be paid, if the logic of the situation is to be consistent, to the modern‑day White descendants of the White Slaves of early America.
The whole discussion of Negro slavery, Southern racism and the Civil War as currently framed by the Establishment agenda, necessarily must exclude any examination of the fact of White Slavery, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the condition of free White Poor in the 19th century forced to compete against Negro slave labor in the South.
The enslavement of Whites extended throughout the American colonies and White Slave labor was a crucial factor in the economic development of the colonies. Gradually it developed into a fixed system every bit as rigid and codified as Negro slavery was to become.
In fact, Negro slavery was efficiently established in colonial America because Black slaves were governed, organized and controlled by the structures and organization that were first used to enslave and control Whites. Black slaves were "late comers fitted into a system already developed." [71]
Do You Know
Who Really Brought the Black Slaves to America?
No study of the White Slave issue would be complete without mentioning something of the Black Slaver which also existed side by side with White Slavery. The truth of the following will, no doubt, anger many people because for some reason they think that the Jews are above criticism.
Say anything you please about a White Man or Woman but utter one little peep about some of the more sordid past of the Jews, and condemnation comes from all sides. Well let the condemnation come the facts of history are facts even though the enemies of truth have tried to hide and change much of it.
This portion of this study will focus on the hidden record of Blacks and Jews from the Jewish historical record. Rabbi Henry Cohen, author of the book, "Justice Justice," makes a telling point.
" [ T]he parallels between the Nazi terror and the American slave trade are more startling than we may realize. When Negroes were brought from the heart of Africa to the American South, one-third died enroute to the African coast and one-third died in the suffocating prisons on board ship. Once here, families were purposely broken up; husbands, wives, and children forced to go their separate ways. Must we be reminded of the death toll in the suffocating boxcars bound for Auschwitz or of the tearing of children from their mothers' arms." [72]
Throughout history Jews have faced charges of economic exploitation of Gentile communities around the world. Indeed, no single group of people have faced blanket expulsion in so many places around the world as frequently as have the Jews. The patter and the charges are familiar: monopolization, usury "sharp practices," selling "cheap" goods, frequent bankruptcies, etc.
All such claims seem to preface the expulsion orders and are vigorously denied both by those charged and by the Jewish writers of history. But this is not the only charge that is made against Jews. Jews have been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal endeavor ever undertaken against an entire race of people - a crime against humanity - the Black African Holocaust.
They were participants in the entrapment and forcible exploitation of millions of Black African citizens into the wretched and inhuman life of bondage for the financial benefit of Jews. The effects of this unspeakable tragedy are still being felt among the peoples of the world at this very hour.
Deep within the recesses of the Jewish historical record is the irrefutable evidence that the most prominent of the Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnaped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history, with the exception of White slaves who were brought to the Americas at a rate of about 10 Whites to 1 Black, and participated in every aspect of the international slave trade. The immense wealth of Jews...was acquired by the brutal subjugation of Black Africans purely on the basis of skin color - a concept unfamiliar to Moses.
Now compiled for the first time, the Jewish sources reveal the extent of their complicity in Black slavery in the most graphic of terms. Until now, the facts herein were known only to a few. Most have always assumed that the relationship between Blacks and Jews has been mutually supportive, friendly and fruitful, two suffering people bounding to overcome hatred and bigotry to achieve success. But History Tells an Altogether Different Story.
Rabbi: Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael
http://www.blacksandjews.com/MarcLeeRaphael.html#anchor196437
The following passages are from Dr. Raphael's book Jews and Judaism in the
United States a Documentary History (New York: Behrman House, Inc., Pub,
1983),
pp. 14, 23-25.
"Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed,
the
bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta
(Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased
from
the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a
Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the
British
colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants
played a major role in the slave trade. In fact, in all the American
colonies,
whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently
dominated.
"This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the
eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought
slaves
from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which
in
turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa.
Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in
the
1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's
dominated
Jewish slave trading on the American continent."
Dr. Raphael discusses the central role of the Jews in the New World commerce
and the African slave trade (pp. 23-25):
SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
JEWISH INTERISLAND TRADE: CURACAO, 1656
During the sixteenth century, exiled from their Spanish homeland and
hard-pressed to escape the clutches of the Inquisition, Spanish and
Portuguese Jews
fled to the Netherlands; the Dutch enthusiastically welcomed these talented,
skilled husinessmen. While thriving in Amsterdam-where they became the hub
of a
unique urban Jewish universe and attained status that anticipated Jewish
emancipation in the West by over a century-they began in the 1500's and
1600's to
establish themselves in the Dutch and English colonies in the New World.
These
included Curacao, Surinam, Recife, and New Amsterdam (Dutch) as well as
Barbados, Jamaica, Newport, and Savannah (English). In these European
outposts the
Jews, with their years of mercantile experience and networks of friends and
family providing market reports of great use, played a significant role in
the
merchant capitalism, commercial revolution, and territorial expansion that
developed the New World and established the colonial economies. The
Jewish-Caribbean
nexus provided Jews with the opportunity to claim a disproportionate
influence in seventeenth and eighteenth century New World commerce, and
enabled West
Indian Jewry-far outnumbering its coreligionists further north-to enjoy a
centrality which North American Jewry would not achieve for a long time to
come.
Groups of Jews began to arrive in Surinam in the middle of the seven-teenth
century, after the Portuguese regained control of northern Brazil. By 1694,
twenty-seven years after the British had surrendered Surinam to the Dutch,
there
were about 100 Jewish families and fifty single Jews there, or about 570
persons. They possessed more than forty estates and 9,000 slaves,
contributed
25,905 pounds of sugar as a gift for the building of a hospital, and carried
on an
active trade with Newport and other colonial ports. By 1730, Jews owned 115
plantations and were a large part of a sugar export business which sent out
21,680,000 pounds of sugar to European and New World markets in 1730 alone.
Slave trading was a major feature of Jewish economic life in Surinam which
as
a major stopping-off point in the triangular trade. Both North American and
Caribbean Jews played a key role in this commerce: records of a slave sale
in
1707 reveal that the ten largest Jewish purchasers (10,400 guilders) spent
more
than 25 percent of the total funds (38,605 guilders) exchanged.
Jewish economic life in the Dutch West Indies, as in the North American
colonies, consisted primarily of mercantile communities, with large
inequities in
the distribution of wealth. Most Jews were shopkeepers, middlemen, or petty
merchants who received encouragement and support from Dutch authorities. In
Curacao, for example, Jewish communal life began after the Portuguese
victory in
1654. In 1656 the community founded a congregation, and in the early 1670's
brought its first rabbi to the island. Curacao, with its large natural
harbor, was
the steppng-stone to the other Caribbean islands and thus ideally suited
geographically for commerce. The Jews were the recipients of favorable
charters
containing generous economic privileges granted by the Dutch West Indies
Company
in Amsterdam. The economic life of the Jewish community of Curacao revolved
around ownership of sugar plantations and marketing of sugar, the importing
of
manufactured goods, and a heavy involvement in the slave trade, within a
decade of their arrival, Jews owned 80 percent of the Curacao plantations.
The
strength of the Jewish trade lay in connections in Western Europe as well as
ownership of the ships used in commerce. While Jews carried on an active
trade with
French and English colonies in the Caribbean, their principal market was the
Spanish Main (today Venezuela and Colombia).
Extant tax lists give us a glimpse of their dominance. Of the eighteen
wealthiest Jews in the 1702 and 1707 tax lists, nine either owned a ship or
had at
least a share in a vessel. By 1721 a letter to the Amsterdam Jewish
community
claimed that "nearly all the navigation...was in the hands of the Jews."'
Yet
another indication of the economic success of Curacao's Jews is the fact
that
in 1707 the island's 377 residents were assessed by the Governor and his
Council a total of 4,002 pesos; 104 Jews, or 27.6 percent of the taxpayers,
contributed 1,380 pesos, or 34.5 percent of the entire amount assessed.
In the British West Indies, two 1680 tax lists survive, both from Barbados;
they, too, provide useful information about Jewish economic life. In
Bridgetown
itself, out of a total of 404 households, 54 households or 300 persons were
Jewish, 240 of them living in "ye Towne of S. Michael ye Bridge Town."
Contrary
to most impressions, "many, indeed, most of them, were very poor." There
were
only a few planters, and most Jews were not naturalized or endenizened (and
thus could not import goods or pursue debtors in court). But for merchants
holding letters of endenization, opportunities were not lacking. Barbados
sugar-and its by-products rum and molasses-were in great demand, and in
addition to
playing a role in its export, Jewish merchants were active in the import
trade.
Forty-five Jewish households were taxed in Barbados in 1680, and more than
half of them contributed only 11.7 percent of the total sum raised. While
the
richest five gave almost half the Jewish total, they were but 11.1 percent
of the
taxable population. The tax list of 1679-80 shows a similar picture; of
fifty-one householders, nineteen (37.2 percent) gave less than one-tenth of
the
total, while the four richest merchants gave almost one-third of the total.
An interesting record of interisland trade involving a Jewish merchant and
the islands of Barbados and Curacao comes from correspondence of 1656. It
reminds us that sometimes the commercial trips were not well planned and
that Jewish
captains-who frequently acted as commercial agents as well-would decide
where
to sell their cargo, at what price, and what goods to bring back on the
return trip.End of excerpt
Rabbi Marc Lee Raphael relates: "Jews also took an active part in the Dutch colonial slave trade; indeed, the bylaws of the Recife and Mauricia congregations (1648) included an imposta (Jewish tax) of five soldos for each Negro slave a Brazilian Jew purchased from the West Indies Company. Slave auctions were postponed if they fell on a Jewish holiday. In Curacao in the seventeenth century, as well as in the British colonies of Barbados and Jamaica in the eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a major role in the slave trade.
In fact, in all the American colonies, whether French (Martinique), British, or Dutch, Jewish merchants frequently dominated. This was no less true on the North American mainland, where during the eighteenth century Jews participated in the 'triangular trade' that brought slaves from Africa to the West Indies and there exchanged them for molasses, which in turn was taken to New England and converted into rum for sale in Africa. Isaac Da Costa of Charleston in the 1750's, David Franks of Philadelphia in the 1760's, and Aaron Lopez of Newport in the late 1760's and early 1770's dominated Jewish slave trading on the American continent. " [73]
Ira Rosenwaike relates: "In Charleston, Richmond and Savannah the large majority (over three‑fourths) of the Jewish households contained one or more slaves; in Baltimore, only one out of three households were slaveholding; in New York, one out of eighteen....Among the slaveholding households the median number of slaves owned ranged from five in Savannah to one in New York." [74]
The Jewish author Cecil Roth said: "The Jews of the Joden Savanne [Surinam] were also foremost in the suppression of the successive Negro revolts, from 1690 to 1722: these as a matter of fact were largely directed against them, as being the greatest slave‑holders of the region." [75]
Jacob Rader Marcus relates: "All through the eighteenth century, into the early nineteenth, Jews in the North were to own black servants; in the South, the few plantations owned by Jews were tilled with slave labor. In 1820, over 75 percent of all Jewish families in Charleston, Richmond, and Savannah owned slaves, employed as domestic servants; almost 40 percent of all Jewish householders in the United States owned one slave or more. There were no protests against slavery as such by Jews in the South, where they were always outnumbered at least 100 to 1....But very few Jews anywhere in the United States protested against chattel slavery on moral grounds." [76]
Author Jacob Rader Marcus describes the mockery of the Indian by Hyam Myer's "Wild West Show" in his book, The Colonial American Jew: "[Myer sought] formal permission to exhibit some Mohawks in Europe. Myers sailed with the Indians before the proper certificate was forthcoming from the Indian Commissioner, and had already begun to parade them in Holland and in the taverns of London when the Lords of Trade urged Lieutenant‑Governor Cadwallader Colden in New York to have Johnson put an end to the undertaking. From all indications Myers made no money on his grand European tour, for he ended up owing the Indians money ‑ or refusing to pay them. Then, as now, there was "no business like show business!"
Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of the American Reform Jews, wrote of the California Indians: "...though not total savages, [they] are very primitive and ignorant....[They do] nothing besides loafing and begging...They catch trout in the river, and then sell them to buy ammunition, shoot rabbits, birds, eat various roots and wild plants, also snakes, frogs, dogs, cats, and rats, and say, 'Me work no.' In conversation with several of them I found that they have no particular home and are heathens."
The American and Foreign Anti‑Slavery Society Report of 1853: "The Jews of the United States have never taken any steps whatever with regard to the slavery question. As citizens, they deem it their policy to have every one choose which ever side he may deem best to promote his own interests and the welfare of his country. They have no organization of an ecclesiastical body to represent their general views; no General Assembly, or its equivalent.
The American Jews have two newspapers, but they do not interfere in any discussion which is not material to their religion. It cannot be said that the Jews have formed any denominational opinion on the subject of American slavery...The objects of so much mean prejudice and unrighteous oppression as the Jews have been for ages, surely they, it would seem, more than any other denomination, ought to be the enemies of caste, and friends of universal freedom."
Rabbi Bertram W. Korn states: "It would seem to be realistic to conclude that any Jew who could afford to own slaves and had need for their services would do so...Jews participated in every aspect and process of the exploitation of the defenseless blacks." [77]
Louis Epstein, author of Sex Laws and Customs in Judaism: "The female slave was a sex tool beneath the level of moral considerations. She was an economic good, useful, in addition to her menial labor, for breeding more slaves. To attain that purpose, the master mated her promiscuously according to his breeding plans. The master himself and his sons and other members of his household took turns with her for the increase of the family wealth, as well as for satisfaction of their extra‑marital sex desires. Guests and neighbors too were invited to that luxury."
Seymour B. Liebman stated: "They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale...[They] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish enterprise....The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains." [78]
Herbert I. Bloom relates: "The Christian inhabitants [of Brazil] were envious because the Jews owned some of the best plantations in the river valley of Pernambuco and were among the leading slave‑holders and slave traders in the colony."1 "Slave trade [sic] was one of the most important Jewish activities here [in Surinam] as elsewhere in the colonies."2 [79]
Arnold Wiznitzer says: "The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payment. It happened that cash was mostly in the hands of Jews. The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of competitors they could buy slaves at low prices. On the other hand, there also was no competition in the selling of the slaves to the plantation owners and other buyers, and most of them purchased on credit payable at the next harvest in sugar. Profits up to 300 percent of the purchase value were often realized with high interest rates....If it happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the auction had to be postponed. This occurred on Friday, October 21, 1644." [80]
Rabbi Morris Raphall tells us: "[I]t remains a fact which cannot be gainsaid that in his own native home, and generally throughout the world, the unfortunate Negro is indeed the meanest of slaves. Much had been said respecting the inferiority of his intellectual powers, and that no man of his race has ever inscribed his name on the Parthenon of human excellence, either mental or moral." [81]
W.E.B. DuBois, an NAACP leader: "The Jew is the heir of the slave‑baron in Dougherty [Georgia]; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction_'improvement' companies, wine companies, mills and factories; nearly all failed, and the Jew fell heir." [82]
Jewish Racism by Moses Mimonides: The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion refers to Moses Maimonides as "the symbol of the pure and orthodox faith." His Guide to the Perplexed is considered the greatest work of Jewish religious philosophy, but his view of Blacks was Hitlerian: "[T]he Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes. For they have the external shape and lineaments of a man and a faculty of discernment that is superior to that of the apes."
Philadelphia Jewish weekly, The Jewish Record of January 23, 1863: "We know not how to speak in the same breath of the Negro and the Israelite. The very names have startlingly opposite sounds _ one representing all that is debased and inferior in the hopeless barbarity and heathenism of six thousand years the other, the days when Jehovah conferred on our fathers the glorious equality which led the Eternal to converse with them, and allow them to enjoy the communion of angels. Thus the abandoned fanatics insult the choice of God himself, in endeavoring to reverse the inferiority which he stamped on the African, to make him the compeer, even in bondage, of His chosen people.
There is no parallel between such races. Humanity from pole to pole would scout such a comparison. The Hebrew was originally free and the charter of his liberty was inspired by his Creator. The Negro was never free and his bondage in Africa was simply duplicated in a milder form when he was imported here...The judicious in all the earth agree that to proclaim the African equal to the surrounding races, would be a farce which would lead the civilized conservatism of the world to denounce the outrage."
Major Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785‑1851). He was considered the most distinguished Jewish layman in his time. He was such a prolific proponent of slavery, that the first Black American periodical, The Freedom's Journal, was launched in response to Noah's racist propaganda. He actually defended slavery by calling it liberty: "There is liberty under the name of slavery. A field Negro has his cottage, his wife, and children, his easy task, his little patch of corn and potatoes, his garden and fruit, which are his revenue and property. The house servant has handsome clothing, his luxurious meals, his admitted privacy, a kind master, and an indulgent and frequently fond mistress." He argued that "the bonds of society must be kept as they now are" and that "To emancipate the slaves would be to jeopardize the safety of the whole country." The Freedom's Journal called Noah the Black man's "bitterest enemy" and William Lloyd Garrison, the leading White abolitionist, called him the "lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross."
Jews and Hollywood, Anti‑Defamation League Charter: "For a number of years a tendency has manifested itself in American life toward the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on the stage, in moving pictures. The effect of this on the unthinking public has been to create an untrue and injurious impression of an entire people and to expose the Jew to undeserved contempt, and ridicule. The caricatures center around some idiosyncrasy of the few which, by the thoughtless public, is often taken as a pivotal characteristic of the entire people..."
Neal Gabler, Author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood: "What is amazing is the extent to which they succeeded in promulgating this fiction throughout the world. By making a ‘shadow’ America, one which idealized every old glorifying bromide about the country, the Hollywood Jews created a powerful cluster of images and ideas‑so powerful that, in a sense, they colonized the American imagination...Ultimately, American values came to be defined largely by the movies the Jews made."
Lester D. Friedman, Author of Hollywood's Image of the Jew: "Today, most people associate the blackface tradition with minstrel shows, and more particularly with Al Jolson. In actuality, many Jewish performers gained early and continued success using it. Sophie Tucker was billed as the 'World Renowned Coon Shouter' or more euphemistically as the 'Manipulator of Coon Melodies.' Eddie Cantor played Salome in drag and blackface, while George Burns often toured with an even more comically stylized blackface than Jolson's. Later George Jessel often joined Eddie Cantor on stage in various blackface routines...Indeed, it is too easy to ignore the derogatory aspects of such activities, the unconscious racism accepted and nourished by such cruel parodies, by citing historical contexts. The undisguised elements of ridicule in such blackface portrayals by Jews mimicking the outlandish stereotypes of blacks now looks suspiciously like one group's desperate need to assert its own superiority by mimicking another. Such a motivation while perhaps unconscious is nonetheless hard to ignore."
Rob Reiner, Film Director 1992: "It's all run by Jews, even Disney. That's funny, because Walt Disney was a terrible reactionary. If he found out that Jeffrey Katzenberg were running his company, he'd be spinning in his grave. That's a wonderful bit of poetic justice."
Other Issues a B'nai B'rith Magazine, May, 1925, vol. 39: “Darktown Rastus: Whuffo' yo' 'jeculate yoself to me in dat onery manner? Cicero: Whoffo'? Nigguh, who do yo' calkerate yo' is? Rastus: Yo' nigguh! mah family am quality folks an' ahm a pusson of rank. Cicero: Huh! ah'll have yo' triflin', Rastus, to know that ah'm ranker than you is.” "Jokes" like these appeared regularly in the B'nai B'rith Magazine even as the ADL fought this kind of defamation of Jews.
Andrew Goodman: "...it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race...The source and cause of this need for reaction can be attributed to white contempt and neglect. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs.
The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity. If they can't do it peacefully, they will do it defensively."
Elie Weisel, A Teacher of Hate: "There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned to hate more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us, but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate....Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate ‑ healthy, virile hate ‑ for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German. To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."[83] :
Robert A. Rockaway, is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University: "After the first World War, Jewish Gangsters became major figures in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation and extension of organized crime in the United States. During Prohibition fifty percent of the leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and directed much of the nations narcotics traffic. Jews also dominated illicit activities in a number of America's largest cities, including Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, and Philadelphia."
We presented some of the above just to show that the Jews are the worst racists that have ever existed, even while they cry out that they are not racist but that everyone else is. Furthermore, in Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht's, "The Fate of the Jews: A People Torn Between Israeli Power and Jewish Ethics," she confronts the reality of her people's western development: "[ W ]hether so many [Southern] Jews would have achieved so high a level of social, political, economic and intellectual status and recognition, without the presence of the lowly and degraded slave {both Black and White}, is indeed dubious. How ironic that the distinctions bestowed upon [Jewish] men like Judah P. Benjamin were in some measure dependent upon the sufferings of the Negro slaves they brought and sold with such equanimity." [84]
It is a relationship that needs further analysis - one that is not fully known. Hidden and misunderstood, it is indeed time to reopen the files to review and reconsider, "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jew."
Throughout the history of the practice, Jews have been involved in the purchase and sale of human beings. This fact is confirmed by their own scholars and historians. In his book, "A History of the Jews," Solomon Grayzel states that "Jews Were among the Most Important Slave Dealers" in European society. [85]
Lady Magnus writes that in the Middle Ages, "The Principal Purchasers of Slaves Were Found among the Jews ...[ T ]hey seemed to be always and everywhere at hand to buy, and to have the means equally ready to pay." [86]
Henry L. Feingold stated that "Jews who were frequently found at the heart of commerce could not have failed to contribute a proportionate share of the [slave] trade directly or indirectly. In 1460, when Jews were the masters of the nautical sciences in Portugal, that nation was importing 700-800 slaves yearly." [87]
The success of these medieval merchants was enhanced by their supreme linguistic abilities. They spoke Arabic, Persian, Roman, Frankish, Spanish and Salvonic and "displayed a business acumen far in advance of the times." [88]
The Jews' participation in the slave trade, particularly their trafficking in non-Jewish slaves, incited the moral indignation of Europe's Gentile population. The Europeans reacted by taxing the Jews and some were expelled from their host countries, for this activity. [89]
The expulsion of the Jews by European governments was not unusual, with most of the complaints centered around economic exploitation, monopolizing, or "sharp practice." By 1500, with the exception of certain parts of Italy, Western Europe had closed its doors to the Jewish people. [90] The following listing is a partial record of the countries and dates of the Jew's expulsion from various European communities. [91]
Mainz,1012 Upper Bavaria, 1442 Genoa, 1515
France, 1182 Netherlands, 1444 Naples, 1533
Upper Bavaria, 1276 Brandenburg, 1446 Italy, 1540
England,1290 Mainz, 1462 Naples, 1541
France, 1306 Mainz, 1483 Prague, 1541
France, 1322 Warsaw, 1483 Genoa, 1550
Saxony, 1349 Spain, 1492 Bavaria, 1551
Hungary, 1360 Italy, 1492 Prague, 1557
Belgium, 1370 Lithuania, 1495 Papal States, 1569
Slovakia, 1380 Portugal, 1496 Hungary, 1582
France, 1394 Naples, 1496 Hamburg, 1649
Austria, 1420 Navarre, 1498 Vienna, 1669
Lyons, 1420 Nuremberg, 1498 Slovakia, 1744
Cologne, 1424 Brandenburg, 1510 Bohemia/Moravia, 1744
Mainz, 1438 Prussia, 1510 Moscow, 1891
Augsburg, 1439
Over the next centuries the centers of Jewish development moved into the Western Hemisphere were land and commercial opportunities proved the incentives for immigration. The open and ungoverned territory and the docile and vulnerable native population offered an irresistible attraction to the "Maligned race."
They acquired great wealth in their Caribbean and South American enterprises and eventually moved into the American Northeast which became the economic focal point. It started with the forced expulsion of the Jews from the Spanish Empire and with the early explorer and "discoverer" of America, Christopher Columbus. Columbus, Jews and the Slave Trade: "Not jewels, but Jews, were the real financial basis of the first expedition of Columbus." [92]
On August 2, 1492, more than 300,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, [93] ending their five century involvement in the Black hostage trade in that region. In fact, the Spanish Jews amassed large fortunes dealing in Christian {White} slaves and became quite prominent within Spain's hierarchy. [94]
They had obtained the most important offices and positions of trust in the cabinets and counting houses of the rulers and had maintained great influence over the regional trade causing many to believe that the Jews exercised an unhealthy domination over the economy of the region. [95] The rulers were convinced enough to order all Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave Spain.
The Marranos: The Secret Jews: The Marranos were those compulsorily converted Jews and their descendants who outwardly became Christians but secretly continued to meet in the synagogue, celebrated feast days and observed the Jewish Sabbath. The name Marrano may be derived from the old Castilian Marrano {swine} or perhaps from the Arabic mahran {forbidden}.
In 1350, Spain began a series of conversion drives to convert all Jews in Spain to Christianity, and in unprecedented numbers, and with little resistance, the Jews converted. [96]
This rush to mass conversion, an event, unparalleled in Jewish history, is perhaps best summed up by Cecil Roth: "It was not difficult for insincere, temporizing Jews to become insincere temporizing Christians." [97]
The "Marranos," also called conversos {the converted}, or nefiti {the neophytes}, or "New Christians," wee simply charged with not being Catholic. The same applied to the Muslims, who were expelled in like manner and in greater numbers than the Jews. [98] Some fifty thousand Jews chose to convert rather than leave their land and their riches. [99]
Contrary to popular notions, those who left were not refugees searching for religious freedom, but entrepreneurs looking for economic opportunities. When they fled, they brought few Torah scrolls and eve fewer copies of the Jewish holy book Talmud with them. When asked what he thought most Marranos knew of Judaism after their flight from Spain and Portugal, Roth answered in one word - "Nothing." [100]
The majority fled south and eastward to North Africa and to centers like Salonika, Constantinople, Aleppo and Damascus, [101] while others sought and found refuge in the Netherlands where they "established synagogues, schools, cemeteries and a high level of wealth and culture." [102]
Most escaped "with considerable sums of money." [103] Though scattered throughout the globe by political, economic and religious circumstances, they would reunite later in a an unholy coalition of kidnappers and slave makers.
The day after the Spanish expulsion, Christopher Columbus, whose actual name was Cristobol Colon, took a group of Jewish refugees with him to the New World.[104] Queen Isabella signed the expulsion decree and Columbus' voyage order the very same day. But it was not the queen or the king who funded the voyage.
George Cohen, among many Jewish historians, proclaims that wealthy Jews financed the expeditions of Columbus, and adds that the story of Isabella's jewels "is not founded on facts," but rather it was an invention "intended to glorify the Queen." [105]
Three Marranos, Luis de Santagel {or Santangelo}, [106] a wealthy merchant, Gabriel Sanchez, [107] the royal treasurer and his assistant, Juan Cabrero, influenced Queen Isabella to help them finance the voyage. Cabrero and Santagel invested 17,000 ducats, which would be well over $100,000 today.[108]
Alfonso de la Caballeria and Diego de Deza also provided funds; Abraham Ben Samuel Zacuto provided astronomy and navigation equipment and Isaac Abravanel also assisted. Six prominent Jews accompanied Columbus including Mastre Bernal, a physician; Marco, a surgeon; Roderigo Sanchez, and inspector; Luis de Torres, an interpreter; and sailors Alfonso de la Calle, [109] and Roderigo de Triana, who is claimed to be "the first white man ever to see the new world." [110]
Torres settle in Cuba and has been credited with introducing tobacco to Europe from his vast tobacco plantations. [111] Cecil Roth's History of the Marranos: "The connection between the Jews and the discovery of America was not, however, merely a question of fortuitous coincidence. The epoch-making expedition of 1492 was as a matter of fact very largely a Jewish, or rather a Marrano, enterprise. [112] Columbus, the Jew? A few scholars, including Roth, present strong evidence that Columbus was himself a Jew. He hid his Jewishness, they say, because "no Spanish Jew could ever have expected aid from the king and queen of Spain, so the explorer claimed to be an Italian Catholic." [113]
Tina Levitan, author of Jews in American Life, found the first reference to Columbus' Jewishness in print in a diplomatic document dated fifty-eight years after the discoverer's death. The French ambassador to Spain, she reveals, refers to "Columbus the Jew," [114]
Furthermore she states: "From him we learn that Cristobal Colon {who never called himself Christopher Columbus and never spoke of wrote Italian} was the son of Susanna Fontanarossa {also spelled Fonterosa} and Domingo Colon of Pontevedra, Spain, where those bearing such surnames were Jews, some of whom had been brought before the Spanish Inquisition...Letters written by him to strangers have the customary X at the top to indicate the faith of the writer, but of the thirteen letters written to his son only one bears an X, and that letter was meant to be shown to the King of Spain. The others have in the place of the X a sign that looks like the Hebrew characters B and H, initials used by religious Jews meaning in Hebrew, 'With the Help of God.'" [115]
Harry L. Golden and Martin Rywell, authors of Jews in American History: Their Contribution to the United States of America, are quite insistent about the Jewishness of Columbus. The cite where Ferdinand, Columbus' son, writes that his father's "progenitors were of the blood royal of Jerusalem..." [116]
In Columbus' words, "for when all is done, David, that most prudent king was first a shepherd and afterwards chosen King of Jerusalem, and I am a servant of that same Lord who raised him to such a dignity." [117]
One Jewish author insists that "all existing portraits of the discoverer gave him a Jewish cast of countenance." Another claimed that a "certain soft-heartedness in Columbus is a Jewish trait." [118]
His lineage also pointed to Jewish roots - his mother's maiden name was Suzanna Fonterosa, "daughter of Jacob, granddaughter of Abraham and a Jewess. His father, Domingo Colon, was a map-seller. Did not Columbus write the King of Spain that his ancestors were interested in maps?" [119]
Columbus, the Slave Dealing Jew? Christopher Columbus was an experienced sailor long before his infamous voyage west. Sir Arthur Helps writes that, "In the course of [his] letters [Columbus] speaks after the fashion of a practiced slave dealer." In fact, in 1498, his five ship expedition brought 600 Indians to Spain as slaves. Two hundred were given to the masters of the ships and four hundred sold in Spain.[120] Columbus employed slave labor in gold mining even before sailing for the New World. He helped to start the Portuguese West African settlement of San Jorge El Mina (St. George of the Mines) in present-day Ghana, formerly known as the Gold Coast.[121]
When the Spaniards found gold in the New World, reports Eric Rosenthal in his book, Gold! Gold! Gold!: The Johannesburg Gold Rush, they started "on a gold hunt of such intensity that the natives came to believe the white men suffered from some disease curable only by the limitless application of this metal...[When] Columbus discovered that, apart from some poor alluvial deposits, the gold simply did not exist, he forced the harmless Indian aborigines into slavery...
The entire importation of gold from the New World for the first 20 years after 1492 represented in case only $300,000 a year, and the total then recovered, worth about $5 million, cost at least 1 ˝ millon Indian lives. [122] Columbus was anything but a blessing to the New World population. The Europeans, led by Columbus, brought unprecedented brutality to the West leaving the remains of whole communities of Red people in their wake." [123]
On Hispaniola Columbus found gold and a docile Arawak population. He lavished praise on the natives and gained their trust and affection and then proceeded to enslave them. According to Columbus: "They are cowards, a thousand running away from three, and thus they are good to be ordered about, to be made to work, plant, and do whatever is wanted, to build towns and be taught to go clothed and accept our customs." [124]
Cities began to spring up all over the island of Hispaniola. The traffic in slaves - African and Indian {and Whites} grew rapidly, and some Jews were engaged in this trade as agents for the royal families of Spain and Portugal. [125]
Whether or not Columbus was a Jew, as so many Jewish historian now claim, has not been definitively proven. It is clear that his brutality against and enslavement of the native population was financed by Jewish investors. The history books appear to have confused the word Jews for the word jewels. Queen Isabel's jewels had no part in the finance of Columbus' expedition, but her Jews did. [126] [127]
The following information is documented in 4 volumes by Elizabeth Donnan, with Documents illustrative of the slave trade in America. They can be found in the National Library Washington, D.C. and in the Carnegie Institute of Technology Library, Pittsburgh, PA.
Name of Ship Owners Nationality
Abigail Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy & Jacob Franks Jewish Crown Isaac Levy and Natham Simpson Jewish
Nassau Moses Levy Jewish
Four Sisters Moses Levy Jewish
Anne and Eliza Justus Bosch and John Adams Jewish
Prudent Betty Henry Cruger and Jacob Phoenix Jewish
Hester Mordecai and Davdi Gomez Jewish
Elizabeth Mordecai and Davdi Gomez Jewish
Antigua Natham Marston and Abram Lyell Jewish
Betsy Wm. De Woolf Jewish
Polly James De Woolf Jewish
White Horse Jan de Sweevts Jewish
Expedition John and Jacob Roosevelt Jewish
Charlotte Moses and Sam Levy; Jacob Franks Jewish
Caracoa Moses and Sam Levy Jewish
The Khazars (Chazars), A Non‑Semitic nation converted to Judaism and from whom most contemporary German, Polish and Russian Jews are descended, "...maintained large numbers of slaves, carried on a thriving slave trade, and may have served as a link between practices of the Hellenistic world and (the) Rus'." [128] ; "A 9th century Arabic account reports that Jews were involved in the trade in Western Europe...Carolingian charters granted Jewish traders the right to transport non‑